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We're still looking for the key to Leon Battista Alberti's satiric novel Momus. There's no agreement on how it should be interpreted as a whole, on the identities of its personages or on the historical events to which it alludes. So wrote Nanni Balestrini in his preface to the most recent edition of the work.2 In proposing a new literary source for Momus, I intend to try to pick the lock, for from this new literary model will follow new identifications for some of Alberti's characters, a different intellectual context to which he responds, a new date, and a new interpretation of his purpose.
It has been shown, convincingly and exhaustively, that Alberti drew heavily from Lucian for Momus' personages and events, especially from Lucian's Parliament of the Gods and Zeus the Tragic Actor, in both of which Alberti's title character, Momus, is a protagonist.3 There are numerous borrowings from other of Lucian's writings, and some from Lucretius, Cicero, the Hermetic corpus,4 and perhaps from Plato's Republic.5
These identifications are useful, but they aren't sufficient. They don't account, for instance, for Momus' main narrative, which is about Jupiter's project to replace the existing world with a more perfect one. David Marsh's recent suggestion-that the story derives from a myth related in a lost Homeric epic cycle known through a Scholia on the Iliad owned by Aurispa and through him perhaps available to Alberti-suggests how arduous the search has become.6 I suggest that a direct model for Momus' plot and a key to its interpretation is much nearer to hand. It was not written by Lucian but by another Second Sophistic author, known as John. It is the Book of Revelation, or Apocalypse, which has for its subject, as does Momus, the end of this world and the creation of a better one. This source may have eluded detection because, since Momus is clearly political and classicizing, it hasn't been regarded as religious and theological. Even so, this quite obvious relation between the two works would surely have been recognized were it not that, unthinkably, Momus is a send up of the Apocalypse, its catastrophic reversal. In Momus, the coming of the new creation, the heavenly city of peace and justice, is not the longed-for fulfillment...